Cancer diagnostic device seriously fails in Israeli hospitals

Serious failure of cancer diagnostic devices: Roche, a major pharmaceutical equipment company, informed the Ministry of Health that a failure had occurred in a series of devices supporting laboratory cancer diagnostics, meaning that there was a rare risk of false positive results and the application of the wrong treatment.

Roche, a leading pharmaceutical and diagnostics company, is known for its contribution to cancer research and treatment.

The failure was reported to the Ministry of Health this week after hospitals discovered discrepancies between the results of tests carried out using the device and additional results from other tests carried out on patients.

Roche investigated and discovered that a batch of laboratory tests intended to detect certain cancers had indeed suffered a failure.

These tests are part of a series of investigations but can be crucial to determining the type of cancer and the treatment used.

Developing cancer cells (purple) are surrounded by healthy cells (pink), illustrating the spread of the original tumor to other parts of the body. (Source: Darryl Leja, National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH/Flickr)

This abnormality means that patients may have tested falsely positive for a specific type of cancer — when the cancerous tumor is different or not cancer at all — and received the incorrect treatment.

The extent of the failure is unclear

The extent of the failure is still unclear, and the ministry does not yet know how many patients were affected by the failure. However, the health ministry stressed that the test is only part of the diagnostic process for some cancers and that additional tests are used to diagnose cancer.

The Ministry of Health said in a statement: “After consultation with professional authorities in the ministry and experts in the field of pathology, it appears that a certified and qualified pathologist can identify the misdiagnosis. However, the head of the medical department has instructed hospitals to review the cases that have tested positive and inform the ministry if there have been cases of misdiagnosis.”